


Role Of A Lifetime

by honestys_easy



Category: American Idol RPF
Genre: Closeted Character, M/M, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-28
Updated: 2007-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-05 07:30:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/720442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honestys_easy/pseuds/honestys_easy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You learn to play the straight man; your lies become routine.  Never really saying what you mean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Role Of A Lifetime

Blake had always hated acting. He always avoided the long lines at auditions for annual school plays in high school, despite half of the student body egging him on, if only to see what antics he might pull. Choosing instead to stay on the outskirts of popular circles, Blake preferred to show his true self to friends, claiming he had nothing to hide, and hoping that others would do the same. Even when he did act, creating obscure characters with nearly as many eccentricities as himself, he made sure his roles were detached from his real personality, pulling an entirely different face in front of Cisco McCarthy’s camcorder.

It wasn’t that Blake hated acting, really; it was that he hated pretending to be less than himself.

The demands the producers detailed for him were itching in the back of his mind, and they planted a permanent scowl on his face for the rest of the day. They had claimed they desired personality and uniqueness for the next American Idol – Blake scoffed at this, knowing that their definition of an idol was horrifically narrow. Because when Blake showed up to Hollywood with self-designed plaid pants and a dark new stretch of ink slashed against his wrist, their tone inexplicably changed.

He kicked the raised platform of the stage in frustration. But it wasn’t the tattoos he had to cover or the jeans they forced him to wear that bothered him. Those were all outside things and Blake could care less about what they disliked about his appearance. He held his hand to his chest, pulling at the tailored shirt, fingernails digging through fabric into the flesh above his heart. 

It was what they attacked below the surface that unhinged him.

\---

“How do you hide it?”

It was the first time he had been invited to this room, and he probably should have had a little more tact, had the concept of tact ever been a huge issue for Blake, and after a week of friendship Chris should have probably known this by now.

“Hide what?” Chris tried to act dumb, pulling off the sweet unassuming Southern boy with accuracy that almost convinced himself at times. He avoided Blake’s eyes, the ones that scared him because they never lied, as he continued to rustle through piles of clothes for an elusive basketball.

Blake’s voice was persistent and Chris wished he never brought him to his hotel room, into a bit of his world. “You know what I mean,” the blond said unflinchingly. Chris made no indication that he knew nor cared; Blake may have gotten into his life fast and deep with a few jam sessions and a sharp, witty tongue, but that didn’t mean Chris could trust him with this. Not yet.

“A.J. told me you’re – “

“A.J.’s a fucking liar,” Chris shot back almost automatically. It was interesting for him to find all the old defense mechanisms still worked like he was back in high school.

Blake looked taken aback at the sudden burst of anger, especially coming from a man he didn’t think would hurt a housefly. It looked like someone wasn’t just playing straight for the producers’ sakes. “Look, whatever man.” He held up his arms in defeat; he wasn’t going to argue with a man that could easily take him down, even on Blake’s best day. “I’m not going to judge you. It’s just…now I need to figure out how to hide from the people who really are judging us.”

Procuring the basketball from underneath a pile of athletic socks and boxer briefs, Chris gripped it tightly in his hand, veins pulsing and crisscrossing against his hands like a roadmap. “Are we playing ball, or not?” Irritated, he avoided the real question lingering in the air between them. He didn’t trust Blake enough to let him in to something that deep and that dark. He wasn’t sure he trusted himself with letting Blake know that about him.

As he bounded out the door Blake watched him go, the retreating muscular back visibly relaxing as Chris left the conversation back in the hotel room. Oh, they were playing all right, Blake thought, but it was clear to both of them this was no longer about basketball.

\---

It was days before Chris said anything else on the subject, after A.J. was unceremoniously ousted from the competition and the Virginian was left with a half-empty hotel room and a friend he only jokingly said wouldn’t go away.

“It’s not that tough.”

Blake was startled out of his daydreaming, lying on the far bed with his feet propped against the headboard, with no little sparkplug of a Tabaldo to shoo him off. “Fine then, you sleep in Sligh’s room and see if you can handle that fog horn,” he laughed.

Chris shook his head; he could claim that Blake wasn’t paying attention, but he was the one to bring it up out of the blue. Maybe Blake had long forgotten they even had the conversation. “No, not that.” Blake perked an ear in Chris’s direction but he didn’t move, forgetting for the moment that Chris was not a deer in the brush and wouldn’t dart away at the slightest movement. 

“It’s…it’s like that army shit, I guess. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Don’t look too long at another guy unless you plan to fight him. Don’t wear purple.” At this, Chris shot out a hand and tapped playfully on the tip of Blake’s sneaker – Blake didn’t even notice the hue of the most recent t-shirt in his rotation until Chris said something. Curbing his fashion sense was apparently never going to get old.

A heavy pause fell between them as the twilight of a mild Californian winter turned into a full-fledged evening; neither man chose to move, to get up and flick on a light switch or a table lamp. They simply sat there in the darkening gloom of night, Chris’s eyes shining like beacons upon Blake’s frame, Blake as attentive as an alley cat on the hunt. “Don’t let anyone,” Chris said, his voice much smaller than before. “Anyone, look into your eyes and see what you’re hiding behind them. Because if they look – really look at you and not just what you want them to see – they’ll know. And then it’ll be all over.”

Shifting on the bed carefully, Blake sat upright, folding his legs underneath him delicately. His voice rose barely above a whisper; it felt like the intimacy of the situation warranted a soft tone. “Why are you telling me all this?”

Chris bit back his initial answer of an unseen shrug of his shoulders and a mumbled “I dunno.” He suppressed the urge to blurt out his secondary response of “I trust you and I need you to know and I need you to know” because he could only reveal so much to Blake on a daily basis without breaking himself. He didn’t want to think about the dull thudding of Blake slipping off his sneakers and dropping them onto the carpet; he didn’t want to think about the fact that Blake was slowly settling himself to sleep in A.J.’s empty bed like he had done the three nights before.

“Because…” he chose the third thing running through his mind, allowing his eyes to close and concentrate on the sound of Blake’s breathing. “It gets lonely, keeping truths all to yourself.” He smiled to himself as the breaths momentarily stopped in a gasp. “If you can’t share a secret with someone, it’ll drive you insane.”

\---

“You are just fucking unreadable, Richardson.”

Blake had taken him away from the boisterous yet observant crowd at the Top 12 celebration party, the younger man a hot mess of giggles and wobbly legs, who had apparently left his alcohol tolerance somewhere east of the Mississippi. Blake knew a serious conversation would get nowhere at this point, but the vodka running through his blood always gave him a case of the “why nots”. Why not talk about this at a time when Chris wasn’t likely to remember it in the morning?

Chris slumped against the brick wall, thankful for the cooler air of the alley. “Dunno what you’re talkin’ ‘bout,” he slurred with a sloppy smile, his eyes closed. “I’m an open book.”

“Yeah, but you’re written in invisible ink and I left my secret decoder ring in the cereal box.” Blake shoved his hands in his pockets when he noticed Chris wasn’t lucid enough to get the joke. “You avoid the topic altogether, then you bring it up when I’m talking sandwiches. You ask me to leave; you ask me to stay. You talked up Alaina Alexander tonight like she’s got on space pants, then you come over and sit on my fucking lap.”

Blake crossed his arms in front of his chest; he couldn’t seem to find the best position for confronting your drunken friend, who was quickly becoming your best friend, who was quickly becoming the guy who made you hard at the very thought of him in the mid-afternoon. Chris gave a shrug, and Blake tried not to make his half-lustful gasp that audible when he caught a glimpse of endless green rimmed with red. “There was no more room on the couch” was the best excuse Chris could muster, and he fell silent again.

Worrying that the interrogation had put back defensive walls he had worked for weeks to dismantle, Blake changed his stance, instead leaning against the same wall, staring deep into eyes that lied to everyone but him. “Are you just fucking with me now, Rich, or what?”

Chris shook his head, breaking every rule he had made for himself in the past decade in the span of twenty minutes. “It’s not…you make it sound so easy, Blake.” Chris leaned forward, his sense of personal space off from the alcohol, and Blake was too engrossed in his eyes to speak up. “I’m sorry I sat down there, I am, ‘cause you’re my friend. My very bestest. But dude, for ten years I didn’t fucking sit in my guy friends’ laps. I didn’t hang with them 24 hours a day and still not get tired of the sound of their voice. I didn’t jerk off thinking about them and then hate myself afterwards.”

“You shouldn’t hate yourself for it,” was all Blake could come up with after all that, and he regretted it afterwards, thinking it sounded too shallow, too egocentric. Chris snorted indifferently; at that point in the night, he couldn’t care either way.

“And now here you are, all pride flags and pink dolphins,” Chris was talking nonsense now, Blake realized while cocking an eyebrow, and he couldn’t tell if it was the alcohol or his own jumbled mind fueling it. “You’re everything I fear…you’re everything I want to be.” He took a deep breath, his eyes locking with warm golden brown, unflinching, seeing through everything. “You’re everything I want –“

Chris stumbled then, not sure if his original movements were to get closer or farther away from Blake, and he was about to hit the hard pavement when a pair tattooed arms shot out to catch his fall. Blake leaned into the larger man’s frame with audible strain, arms hooked underneath armpits, brazenly palming shoulder blades, bodies pressed together like never before. He pulled up and without thinking pressed his lips to Chris’s, taking in all of his taste, his scent.

Sensation surged through Blake’s body as they kissed, his eyes slowly drifting shut as he felt Chris’s arms around him, whether for comfort or balance or to stop his world from spinning. Chris tasted like stale beer and spice, like drunken desperation and something deeper and tantalizing Blake would never attempt to put into words. He wanted more, always wanted more from the man that only gave him an inch inside every time. He flicked his tongue out between parted lips, hearing a gasp from the other man as he grazed the tip against Chris’s mouth.

Something broke inside of Chris, all of the emotions and images of himself he’d kept locked up for years, and it came out in a burst, pushing Blake back and breaking their kiss. “Blake,” he whispered, fingertips burning against the fabric of Blake’s shirt.

“Chris,” the older man breathed back, taking in the way his name sounded on Chris’s lips and hiding it away in his mind to save for years to come.

\---

He caught him once, staring out the window of their shared bedroom where even the maids didn’t bother with separating the beds anymore, still hours away from any indication of dawn. He wanted to call out to him, coax him back into bed, get some more sleep before the dress rehearsals tomorrow. But then Blake saw the liquid sheen in Chris’s eyes glinting off the streetlights outside, his silent yet solid naked frame tense in silhouette, and he chose instead to let it be.

There were still pieces of Chris that Blake would never understand no matter how he tried, and some of them Chris wouldn’t ever want him to.

\---

Breathe in, breathe out. Blake enjoyed the steady sound of the other man’s breathing far too much. He sometimes found himself forgetting anything else he was doing, forgetting to breathe himself until he grew dizzy, just to listen to the feather-light air passing through his body.

But today those breaths grew shallow, shorter, and Blake frowned, he could tell something was wrong. He raised his hand, poked the younger man in between rib bones, the space between the third and fourth always causing him to shirk back defensively, but with a smile. Only Chris didn’t smile this time, simply giving Blake a look to not make this worse than it already was.

“I don’t want to go in there.” Chris fiddled with the cuffs of his white jacket, fingers ghosting over two rubber bands, nervous little habits Blake had grown so fond of over the weeks. “They’re gonna ask…I know that douche is gonna ask.”

The paranoia, the constant fear he’d be found out; now that was something Blake just couldn’t get behind. Blake developed his own nervous tics, a side effect from falling in love with all of Chris’s, and he folded his arms in front of his chest, balancing on the balls of his feet. “It’s not CNN,” he reassured the other man. “I doubt Idol will even let him ask anything serious.”

“I don’t want to lie anymore,” Chris blurted out, and the declaration whispered thirty seconds before air time stilled Blake’s nerves, stilled even his breathing. Chris looked over to him, eyes green and bright with yearning, the realization that this was all he wanted – that Blake was all he ever wanted – hitting him harder than it could ever hit the older man. “I’m done with the lying, the hiding.”

Blake reached out again towards Chris, but this time it was a soft, encouraging caress against his side and not a poke in the ribs that greeted him. “Your self-confidence has the fucking worst timing, Rich.” The hand gave a light squeeze, and then Blake was standing on his toes, lips feathering against Chris’s, eyes open and staring because he could never get enough. “And I love you for it.”

The red recording light flicked on in the waiting wings, a harried production assistant pushing at their backs to get in view of the cameras, and what little time they had for their moment was gone. Blake knew he couldn’t tell Chris what to do about it all, and Chris knew Blake wouldn’t give him any easy answers. They bounded onto the set, staging a mini-fight for the audience, knowing in their hearts that the truth and the love between them was all that ever mattered.


End file.
